Financial statement comparability and corporate tax avoidance

Financial Statement Comparability: Benets and Costs

This paper analyzes the bene…ts and costs of …nancial statement comparability from an information perspective. We …rst show analytically that while comparability enhances the correlation among …rms’reported earnings (“common informativeness”), it reduces …rms’own reporting precision (“individual informativeness”). Next, we provide theoretical justi…cation for the comparability measure of De Fra...

Mandatory IFRS Adoption and Financial Statement Comparability

This study examines whether mandatory adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) leads to capital market benefits through enhanced financial statement comparability. UK domestic standards are considered very similar to IFRS (Bae et al. 2008), suggesting any capital market benefits observed for UK-domiciled firms are more likely attributable to improvements in comparability (...

Externalities of Corporate Tax Avoidance

We show that when a meaningful proportion of firms in an economy engage in tax avoidance strategies, the covariance between a firm’s cash flow and the market cash flows increases, thereby increasing a firm’s cost of capital. This negative externality is imposed on all firms in the economy, not just tax-avoiding firms. The negative externality results regardless of the level of uncertainty assoc...

Financial statement comparability and credit risk

Investors, financial reporting policymakers, and accounting educators emphasize the importance of financial statement comparability. Accounting researchers have found it difficult to develop empirical measures of comparability that correspond to typical views of the construct. The measures used in recent research are removed from firms’ accounting treatments and are likely to be driven by econo...

Tax Avoidance , Corporate Transparency , and Firm Value